Joanna Bourke

Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare

An Intimate History of Killing

Fear -- the word, itself, conjures the appropriate response. With a dark cacophony of associations like fright, dread, horror, panic, alarm, anxiety, and terror, fear is universally understood as one of the most basic and powerful of human emotions, obtaining a nearly palpable and overwhelming substance in today's world. In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed historian and prize-winning author Joanna Bourke covers the landscape of fear over the past two hundred years: From the nineteenth century dread of being buried alive -- a subject dear to the heart of Edgar Allen Poe -- to the current worry over being able to die when one chooses; from the diagnoses of phobias and anxieties produced by psychotherapists and lovingly catalogued, to the role of popular culture and media in inciting panic and dread; from the horrors of the nuclear age to the fear of twenty-first century terrorism, Fear tells the story of anguish in modern times. A blend of social and cultural history with psychology, philosophy, and popular science, this astonishing book -- exhaustively researched and beautifully written -- offers strikingly original insights into the mind and worldview of the long twentieth century from one of the most brilliant scholars of our time.

A Cultural History

Fear

An investigation of rape from a historical standpoint evaluates rape as a social construction to cover such topics as the physical responses of rapists, the "rape is about power" theory, and belief systems about embodiment, in a report that places an emphasis on rape perpetrators.

Sex, Violence, History

Rape

Everyone knows what it feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what they describe as 'painful' has changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, people believed that pain served a specific (and positive) function - it was a message from God or Nature; it would perfect the spirit. 'Suffer in this life and you wouldn't suffer in the next one'. Submission to pain was required. Nothing could be more removed from twentieth and twenty-first century understandings, where pain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be 'fought'. Focusing on the English-speaking world, this book tells the story of pain since the eighteenth century, addressing fundamental questions about the experience and nature of suffering over the last three centuries. How have those in pain interpreted their suffering - and how have these interpretations changed over time? How have people learnt to conduct themselves when suffering? How do friends and family react? And what about medical professionals: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professional detachment? As Joanna Bourke shows in this fascinating investigation, people have come up with many different answers to these questions over time. And a history of pain can tell us a great deal about how we might respond to our own suffering in the present - and, just as importantly, to the suffering of those around us.

From Prayer to Painkillers

The Story of Pain

Stupro. Storia della violenza sessuale dal 1860 a oggi

Revela el drama de una violencia que, pese a estar presente con frecuencia en los medios de comunicación, no se denuncia apenas y, cuando se hace, sólo un cinco por ciento de los casos termina en condena.

Historia del estupro de 1860 a nuestros días

Los violadores

Wars are frequently justified 'in our name'. Militarist values and practices co-opt us, permeating our language, invading our dream space, entertaining us at the movies or in front of game consoles. Our taxes pay for those war machines. Our loved ones are killed and maimed. With killing now an integral part of the entertainment industry in video games and Hollywood films, war has become mainstream. With the 100th anniversary of the declaration of the First World War, has come a deluge of books, documentaries, feature films and radio programmes. We will hear a great deal about the horror of the battlefield. Bourke acknowledges wider truths: war is unending and violence is deeply entrenched in our society. But it doesn't have to be this way. This book equips readers with an understanding of the history, culture and politics of warfare in order to interrogate and resist an increasingly violent world.

How Military Violence and War-Play Invade our Lives

Wounding the World

Impact on the male body of the War to end all wars. Issues such as malingering, dismemberment and male bonding.

Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War

Dismembering the Male

Looking across time and the globe, a critical history of sexual violence—what causes it and how we overcome it. Disgrace is the first truly global history of sexual violence. The book explores how sexual violence varies widely across time and place, from nineteenth-century peasant women in Ireland who were abducted as a way of forcing marriage, to date-raped high-school students in twentieth-century America, and from girls and women violated by Russian soldiers in 1945 to Dalit women raped by men of higher castes today. It delves into the factors that facilitate violence—including institutions, ideologies, and practices—but also gives voice to survivors and activists, drawing inspiration from their struggles. Ultimately, Joanna Bourke intends to forge a transnational feminism that will promote a more harmonious, equal, and rape- and violence-free world.

Global Reflections on Sexual Violence

Disgrace

It has been contended that femininity was disrupted, constructed and reconstructed during World War I, but what happened to masculinity? Using the evidence of letters, diaries and oral histories of members of the military and of civilians, this book explores the impact of the Great War on the male body.

Sex with animals is one of the last taboos but, for a practice that is generally regarded as abhorrent, it is remarkable how many books, films, plays, paintings, and photographs depict the subject. So, what does loving animals mean? In this book the renowned historian Joanna Bourke explores the modern history of sex between humans and animals. Bourke looks at the changing meanings of “bestiality” and “zoophilia,” assesses the psychiatric and sexual aspects, and she concludes by delineating an ethics of animal loving.

On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love

Loving Animals

In 1872, a woman known only as "An Earnest Englishwoman" published a letter titled "Are Women Animals?" in which she protested against the fact that women were not treated as fully human. In fact, their status was worse than that of animals: regulations prohibiting cruelty against dogs, horses, and cattle were significantly more punitive than laws against cruelty to women. The Earnest Englishwoman's heartfelt cry was for women to "become–animal" in order to gain the status that they were denied on the grounds that they were not part of "mankind." In this fascinating account, Joanna Bourke addresses the profound question of what it means to be "human" rather than "animal." How are people excluded from political personhood? How does one become entitled to rights? The distinction between the two concepts is a blurred line, permanently under construction. If the Earnest Englishwoman had been capable of looking 100 years into the future, she might have wondered about the human status of chimeras, or the ethics of stem cell research. Political disclosures and scientific advances have been re–locating the human–animal border at an alarming speed. In this meticulously researched, illuminating book, Bourke explores the legacy of more than two centuries, and looks forward into what the future might hold for humans, women, and animals.

Historical Reflections from the 1800s to the Present

What It Means to Be Human

Some historians contend that femininity was "disrupted, constructed and reconstructed" during World War I, but what happened to masculinity? Using the evidence of letters, diaries, and oral histories of members of the military and of civilians, as well as contemporary photographs and government propoganda, Dismembering the Male explores the impact of the First World War on the male body. Each chapter explores a different facet of the war and masculinity in depth. Joanna Bourke discovers that those who were dismembered and disabled by the war were not viewed as passive or weak, like their civilian counterparts, but were the focus of much government and public sentiment. Those suffering from disease were viewed differently, often finding themselves accused of malingering. Joanna Bourke argues convincingly that military experiences led to a greater sharing of gender identities between men of different classes and ages. Dismembering the Male concludes that ultimately, attempts to reconstruct a new type of masculinity failed as the threat of another war, and with it the sacrifice of a new generation of men, intensified.

Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War

Joanna Bourke, author of the critically-acclaimed Fear, unflinchingly and controversially moves away from looking at victims to look at the rapists. She examines the nature of rape, drawing together the work of criminologists, sociologists and psychiatrists to analyse what drives the perpetrators of sexual violence. Rape - A History looks at the perception of rape, both in the mass media and the wider public, and considers the crucial questions of treatment and punishment. Should sexual offenders be castrated? Will Freud's couch or the behaviourists' laboratory work most effectively? Particular groups of offenders such as female abusers, psychopaths and exhibitionists are given special attention here, as are potentially dangerous environments, including the home, prison, and the military. By demystifying the category of the rapist and revealing the specificities of the past, Joanna Bourke dares to consider a future in which sexual violence has been placed outside the human experience.

Rape: A History From 1860 To The Present

Professor of History Joanna Bourke

This textbook looks at the construction of class within the intimate contexts of the body, the home, the marketplace, the locality and the nation to assess how the subjective identity of the 'working class' has been maintained.Integrating a variety of historical approaches and methods, Joanna Bourke looks at the construction of class within the intimate contexts of the body, the home, the marketplace, the locality and the nation to assess how the subjective identity of the 'working class' in Britain has been maintained through seventy years of radical social, cultural and economic change. She argues that class identity is essentially a social and cultural rather than an institutional or political phenomenon and therefore cannot be understood without constant reference to gender and ethnicity. Each self contained chapter consists of an essay of historical analysis, introducing students to the ways historians use evidence to understand change, as well as useful chronologies, statistics and tables, suggested topics for discussion, and selective further reading.

Gender, Class, and Ethnicity

Working Class Cultures in Britain, 1890-1960

The Second World War surpassed all previous wars in the sheer cost of many millions of lives, most of them civilian. It left a world reeling from physical destruction on a scale never experienced till then, and from the psychological traumas of loss, of imprisonment and genocide, andpermanent exile from home.In this short, uncompromising book, Joanna Bourke, whose work on people's physical and emotional experience of war has been widely acclaimed and influential, turns an unblinking eye on the events and outcomes in the vast number of places in which the War was fought: throughout Western and CentralEurope, on the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union, in the Pacific, in Africa, in Asia. She shows where the strategic decisions came from and how they were implemented, but she also shows, through diary entries and recorded oral history, how ordinary people felt when they witnessed or heard ofevents, from the declaration of war on the radio to the mass murders carried out by Nazi soldiers in Russian villages. But she is even-handed in her choice of witnesses; the moral repugnance of the Nazi regime and its objectives is clear, but so too is the fear of those caught up in events beyondtheir control, whatever side they are on.This, like Joanna Bourke's previous book, is revisionist history: in the course of a miraculously concise account of the Second World War, it tallies the cost to humanity--and the different attitudes of various participating nations--of a war which by the time it ended had changed the world beyondrecognition, to one which had to come to terms with the realities of mass destruction. In a breathtaking sweep she covers the reasons why the war happened; the major theatres of war around the world; resistance; collaboration; persecution and genocide, including the Holocaust; and the ways thatmemory and myth have evolved since the end of the war.

A People's History

The Second World War

Prof Joanna Bourke

Integrating a variety of historical approaches and methods, Joanna Bourke looks at the construction of class within the intimate contexts of the body, the home, the marketplace, the locality and the nation to assess how the subjective identity of the 'working class' in Britain has been maintained through seventy years of radical social, cultural and economic change. She argues that class identity is essentially a social and cultural rather than an institutional or political phenomenon and therefore cannot be understood without constant reference to gender and ethnicity. Each self contained chapter consists of an essay of historical analysis, introducing students to the ways historians use evidence to understand change, as well as useful chronologies, statistics and tables, suggested topics for discussion, and selective further reading.

Gender, Class and Ethnicity

In times of crisis, we often turn to artists for truth-telling and memory-keeping. There is no greater crisis than war, and in this sumptuously illustrated volume, we find a comprehensive visual, cultural, and historical account of the ways in which armed conflict has been represented by artists. Covering the last two centuries, from the Crimean War to the present day, the book shows how the artistic portrayal of war has changed, from a celebration of heroic exploits to a more modern, troubled, and perhaps truthful depiction of warfare and its consequences. The book investigates broad patterns as well as specific genres and themes of war art, and features more than 400 color illustrations by artists including Paul Nash, Judy Chicago, Pablo Picasso, Melanie Friend, Marc Chagall, Francis Bacon, Käthe Kollwitz, Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, Dora Meeson, Otto Dix, and many others. The volume also highlights the work of often overlooked artists, including children, non-Europeans, and prisoners of war. A wide range of subjects, from front-line combat to behind-the-lines wartime experiences are represented in paintings, etchings, photography, film, digital art, comics, and graffiti. Edited and with an introduction by Joanna Bourke, War and Art features essays written by premier experts in the field. This extensive survey is a fitting and timely contribution to our understanding of art, memory, and commemoration of war.

Joanna Bourke

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